Books are one of the best ways to curate a people’s history. Most of what I’ve learned about the world I learned from books. The reigns of monarchs, the biggest world events, the thoughts and lives of people living centuries before I was born, are in the pages of books. There is a reason most people who feel they’ve done anything worthwhile are quick to write memoirs or have biographies about them commissioned. Books immortalize their subjects.
When it comes to history and the lens through which we view it, we’ve been skewed to the West, with the written word playing a huge role in this. Like most children growing up in Africa, a lot of the books I read were Western. Other than a few from Pacesetters and some African classics, most were written by white people. This was especially true as a preteen when classics from Soyinka and Achebe were still beyond my capacity.
I read Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Famous Five, Sweet Valley and Secret Seven. And Classics like Oliver Twist, The Night Before Christmas and everything Jane Austen and the Bronté sisters ever wrote. It was only when I got to high school that I started to read African writers, and even then, it was more for academic purposes and not for leisure. I enjoyed the novels and short stories, but most of it felt very foreign to me even though it was set in Africa and written by Africans.
Fast forward to today and I mostly read books by Africans and people of colour. Some of the things that have made this possible for myself and other book lovers, is the explosion of contemporary African writers on the scene and the ease of accessibility of their work. There are so many book clubs and book stores coming up in Kenya that are encouraging reading of African writers, and just as with the expansion and appreciation of other forms of art, the book scene is growing.
I am a writer and I’ve been published in several poetry and short story anthologies. I would love, like most writers, to one day publish a novel. With this in mind, I’ve been researching how to go about getting published. There are more and better opportunities abroad but those are extremely competitive and have their own agendas. If you’re looking to write sci-fi or romance, international publishers will be a hard sell because they seek African writing that skews towards suffering.
I would prefer to be published locally, but I’ve come to find that it’s easier to self-publish and deal with the work it requires to market and sell your own book, than to deal with the publishing ecosystem here.
One of the biggest issues is the lack of huge sales for books locally. There’s been steady growth, but it still isn’t enough to guarantee a great pay day. It’s why it’s a better bet to self-publish because the margins are already small. The ecosystem is such that writers making bank are the ones whose books have been picked for the school syllabus, guaranteeing a huge market for a solid few years. Everyone else needs to figure out what to do to sell their books and basically make a living as a writer.
I spoke to 4 writers, Aleya Kassam, Anne Moraa, Abigail Arunga and Eric Otieno, at various stages of their careers on their experiences and their thoughts on the publishing industry.
1. What has your experience been as a Kenyan trying to make a living through your writing?
Aleya Kassam
The time I have most consistently made a living as a writer was when I was a copywriter at an advertising agency. For the most part, my every day was writing, and I was guaranteed a salary at the end of the month. When I left the agency, for a while I was able to freelance from copywriting gigs, but they were very sporadic and I was reliant largely on when people needed work. Now, as a co-founder of a content studio, the dream is to make a living through the work that we want to create – the stories that we are interested in writing – however until we get there, the writing work for clients is what helps pay the bills.
Abigail Arunga
There are a couple of difficulties as a Kenyan trying to make a living through writing. Firstly, you can’t just do one thing, which makes it so much harder. You spread yourself thin. You’re always chasing a paycheck. The funny thing is you start off as a writer doing something you love, but sometimes when you make your hobby into a profession that pays your rent, it can kind of ruin it for you.It’s a combination of things. Getting regular gigs is hard. Chasing for your pay for gigs that aren’t regular is hard. Getting people to believe that your work is work is hard. Writing is for the mad. Basically.
That being said, madness can produce great things. Sometimes you can create something that even makes you a fan of yourself. And the great thing about the current crop of writers in Kenya is that they continue to evolve and redefine what being a Kenyan writer is. We are the generation that made being writers for a living possible, and not just if you are a big name. Gen Z can have influencing and Tiktok (still careers and revenue streams in their own right). We made art a lot more mainstream than it used to be, and I love that for us.
Eric Otieno
Making a living through my writing has been tough. It’s taken ages before I can be properly compensated for the effort of my work, and even with this developing reality, I’ve still had to take up multiple jobs to complement the returns my writing gives me. So still a long way to go.
Anne Moraa
There’s joy in writing here as the space is less limiting than more developed countries which allows you to be freely creative. The issue is really money. It’s very difficult to just be a writer and I’ve had to learn to juggle several opportunities to make it work. It’s not a market where you can specialize or be very niche. I’ve had to learn to be a good generalist.
2. In your opinion, what is the biggest challenge facing the publishing industry especially from a writer’s perspective?
Aleya Kassam
I don’t know about the biggest challenge, but for published authors, a big challenge I see is the weakness in distribution models. The distribution networks aren’t as established within the country and continent, which means that even if there is a hunger, the books that are locally published aren’t getting into the hands of people who want to read them. This reliance then on mainly a Nairobi market means the books tend not to sell in the kinds of numbers that make financial sense for the publisher or the author – and so fewer books are published, and less money is made available for promotion.
The publishing industry here has for a while now been forced into a textbook centric model, as in the past, that was what was most financially viable – and so a significant part of the publishing resources, energy and imagination was spent in that sector. I think there are definite disruptors in the market, and people who are imagining and doing different – from Storymoja who have a catalogue of non-text book work, to Makena Onjerika of Nairobi Writing Academy with the anthologies of short stories, to all the journals (on and offline) like Jalada to Down River Road, to people who are self-publishing like Makena Maganjo and Biko Zulu – the examples are many.
For me, as a writer, I am not sure who locally is going to publish the kind of writing I do, which tends to be mostly creative non-fiction. International publishing deals tend to be more lucrative and also are more likely to lead to opportunities to earn from peripherals (talks, festivals etc) – though I know I would really want my book to be published locally as well.
Abigail Arunga
The asinine pseudoreligious tripe that we’re fed when we want to publish, being told that for you to publish something worthy, it has to have a moral. A moral? In a society that’s mostly amoral? Or hypocritical at best? A close second is the idea that publishing companies actually do things for writers. Publishers take all your money, and then do nothing for the writer. You’re actually better off self publishing. When’s the last time you saw a publishing house promoting a writer, or a writer’s event, or a writer’s book launch? Getting them on television? Having them do panels? Can you remember? Because I am a Kenyan writer with two books and I can’t. They take your creative work off of you, make money, you get peanuts and no one is the wiser. Meanwhile they’re supposed to be in charge of it all – promotion, distribution, translation, panels, all of it. It’s the rawest deal imaginable. And there’s a whole association. It’s appalling. Our industry is woefully underdeveloped.
Eric Otieno
There are many big challenges facing the publishing industry; but for most parts, I think gatekeeping and poor structures make the lives of new age writers tumultuous. If you’re not an established writer who’s also big on social media and you’re young, it’s quite hard to find someone to publish you and distribute your book. You’ll have to do a lot of marketing on your own. It is incredibly lonely.
Anne Moraa
I’ll be frank. How much of a publishing industry do we really have? There’s just not enough publishers here. I think it’s challenging for publishers because the audience actually buying books is small so the question is how do we grow that especially beyond Nairobi urban readers? It’s not a question of if Kenyans read, because we do, but if we are able to sustain a profitable market. Commercial viability in this market trends to lean towards education.
There’s also a question on how to practice ethical payment of writers when publishers aren’t hugely profitable. This is something I struggle with. I co-run a creative company and my own company wouldn’t be able to afford me if I charged my actual rate.
3. Do you think there’s any exploitation of Kenyan writers? Why or why not? Have you faced any exploitation?
Aleya Kassam
There is one gazillion percent exploitation of Kenyan writers. I think of the most current example with what Cadbury’s is doing – not only were they not actually paying for the writing – which by the way, even their small pittance of 20k is not fair pay, they are also taking all the intellectual property in all its forms – Makena Onjerika has done a brilliant thread about the ways in which this is problematic.
Kenyan writers, especially many who are starting out, don’t always fully understand what they are giving away when they sign contracts, and often publishing houses or companies will take advantage of that, and of the fact that there is such eagerness to get your work out there, especially when you are starting out, that you are almost just grateful that for the (dare I say it), exposure. Except, in my experience exposure rarely has a direct causal relationship with income. For a few people it can – but these are rare exceptions.
You have an industry in which there isn’t because the space feels so restrictive, even those who are more experienced writers sometimes feel forced to give up rights or accept exploitative contracts because it feels like the only way they can get their work out there, or earn whatever amount they can from their writing.
It really comes down to a serious power imbalance. For people with various privileges, it is easier for them to either to walk away from exploitative deals because they have resources or access to networks that can get them better deals, or different ways to earn a living off their writing or accept the exploitative deal because they are not relying on that to earn their living – and so once again there’s a perpetuation of the class hierarchies that we have especially in Nairobi.
Abigail Arunga
Very much so. All the time. For the reasons in the first two questions. People don’t think writing is a thing. They don’t take it seriously. They don’t appreciate it as an art, or a science, or a career, or something that is actually very hard to do. They think they can take advantage of you. Yes, I have been exploited. The arts industry in Kenya is exploitative. I’ve written for magazines that come out every month and yet take a full year to pay you, if at all. I’ve done television shows that are syndicated across the continent and I was paid a puny fee that I was supposed to be grateful for. I’ve done stuff for free that I shouldn’t have and I did because I needed the – you know how this goes – exposure. I shouldn’t have. They knew it. They didn’t care.
Eric Otieno
As someone who has written in different capacities; either as a digital content creator or a magazine contributor, writers are not compensated for what their work is worth. Then sometimes payment is delayed with poor communication from clients and you have to start begging them to send you your money. It’s undignifying sometimes. Yes, it has happened to me.
Anne Moraa
I think there’s layers to this. There’s publishers paying very little and academic writing that is inherently exploitative. And then there’s platforms with the money but feel that they don’t need to pay African writers well even though they can if they opted to. There’s this feeling that we aren’t deserving of international rates and this is evident across different mediums that use writers including film.
4. What would you like to see change for writers in Kenya?
Aleya Kassam
I want writers to have access to great editors and agents. I would love for the ecosystem to support all the kinds of writing that Kenyan writers want to write
I want Kenyan writers to have markets for their work all over the world, especially in the Continent. I want writing to be valued.
I would love for Kenyan writers to be supported in their writing journeys – from advances to residencies to the space and time that allows great work to form.
Abigail Arunga
A standard rate card. Unity among writers. And writers telling exploitative clients to fuck right off. The more of us who do that, even without a guild or a system, the better it is for us all. Maybe a workshop or sixteen, and a better festival than the ones we have currently, or the growth of the continued ones (the ones who don’t exploit writers, because some do). The figureheads of writing growing, becoming more, so that they are visible and demonstrate that this is possible.
Eric Otieno
I would like that more writers in Kenya are first respected for their craft and not be merely treated as by the ways. And I’d love it if we had more libraries selling Kenyan books especially from contemporary writers and I wish publishing wouldn’t have to be so expensive. I’d also like to see more writing workshops.
Anne Moraa
I’d like to see a lot more opportunities available, especially outside of having to win an international writing prize. I’d like to see Kenyan writers getting paid international rates. The writing here is very good and we just need more space and money to do it. I’d also love to see more genre fiction published.